Woman-ordination and the Female Prophets in the Ancient
Near Eastern religions

Anyone who wants to study this topic will have
to look at the question of female prophetism in cuneiform texts from especially
Mari, Ebla and also Emar.

Ebla is old, maybe in the times of Abraham and
his sons, Mari is during the Egyptian colonialization of the Levant or the
oppression period of 400 years since 1850 BCE. Emar is during the time of Moses
or the Late Bronze period.

For the Mari city during the time of Zimri-Lim
and prophetism there one investigates texts ca. 1740 BCE. For Ebla it could be
to 2154 BCE and for Emar it may be around 1460 BCE. The Mari texts will be used
for Mari, the Ebla text by G. Pettinato and P. Matthiae are used and for the
Emar text one can see D. Arnaud and also Akio Tsukimoto of Japan.

Various terms are used for the word prophet in
the texts. Consensus do exist but also debatable offshoot views regarding these
terms and their proper meaning. The term for professional female prophets in Old-Babylonian
Akkadian is apiltu (during the time of Zimri-Lim of Mari in 1740 BCE),
while raggintu is the term used in Neo-Assyrian texts from Niniveh
in the days of Esarhaddon (just after Isaiah until 650 BCE during the days of Ashurbanipal).
At Ebla it is said by G. Pettinato that he saw in TM 74G.454 the word na-bí-ú--tum.
J. Stökl mentioned that scholars like Kitchen (2003: 384) and Hess (2007: 83)
keep citing Pettinato although it was not published.

Two other terms are also used for the prophets, (Old
Babylonian 1740 BCE) muḫḫūtum
or maḫḫūtum
(Neo- Assyrian 680 BCE).

At Mari there are 70 texts talking about
prophecy (Stökl : 49). Two titles are used namely the apiltum which is
considered by some to be a professional prophet and also the muḫḫūtum
which is seen as an ecstatic female practitioner.

The source that is used here is biased towards
pro-feminism strategies for the interpretation of the cuneiform texts. Thus, Stökl
is constantly trying to downplay the translations of Parpola and Huffmon of
cuneiform texts in the Neo-Assyrian city of Niniveh displaying transgender
cases. For example, a certain individual Baia is spelled with a female
determinative in two cases but in a third text it says Baia is “son of Arba-el”.
Stökl complained that Parpola reconstructed every letter of Baia’s name, so it
cannot be sure if Baia is referred to in the first place in this text. Parpola
also listed examples of cross-dressing in a transgender way at Niniveh. In
another case Ilussa-amur's name is spelt with a female determinative in two
texts. In one of these, Parpola restores a male gentilic. If Parpola is
correct, this is a problem for female roles at the temple. In a third case, the
name Issār-lā-tašȋat,
the gender determinative in front of her name is under debate. Irrespective of
that question, the biological gender of Issār-lā-tašȋat
itself is probably a male: Edzard differed saying that the female form of the
name would have been Issār-la-tašiṭṭȋ'
(Edzard 1962: 126, op. cit Stökl 55). Stökl is quick to argue that the
transgender appearances in the texts are due to copyist errors.

So there are two sets of scholars on the cuneiform
texts and transgender presence in the cult: those who deny it and says it is
the result of copyist errors (Stökl) and those who consider them reality of
transgender practices in the cult, namely, cross-dressing and acting and
speaking like females by men (Parpola and Huffmon).

With this situation, the concept of female
prophetism is in jeopardy since one is not sure whether all the so-called
females were transgender men acting as females, or vice versa, females acting
as males. Stökl tend to think there were two groups the female prophets and the
male prophets and that the female prophets prayed to the female goddesses and
the male prophets prayed to the male gods.

Scholars interested in this topic need to know
that the transgender roles of men and women in the cult of surrounding nations
of Israel was the topic of study not only of Parpola and Huffmon but also other
scholars investigating the role of the gula-priest for example over a period
from Early Bronze to the Persian periods. Emesal Sumerian was a dialect of the
gay practices in the cult of the ancient times.

The modern problems of LGBTQH is not modern. It
is as old as the world. The position of the Bible against it, is not just a pie
in the sky construction countering modern “progressive thinking”. It was
countering degenerative thinking and lifestyles. That position still stands.

Source:

J. Stökl, (2010). Female Prophets in the Ancient
Near East. In Prophecy and Prophets in Ancient Israel. Proceedings of the
Oxford Old Testament Seminar. Edited by J. Day. New York: T&T Clark.
Downloaded from academia.edu.